remove content of directory in elegant way

Question

I would like to remove all content of the current working directory. How to do it in efficient and elegant way?

I have several files, directories and some of them starts with dot, like:

touch .abc; touch abcd ; mkdir foobar; touch "file name" "#"

I am looking for posix compatible, elegant solution, to make this directory empty. I will post some of my ideas, but none of them are perfect.

Answer 1

rm -rf -- * .*

This is portable and works, but it's ugly, because except with zsh, it issues warnings:

rm: cannot remove directory: `.'
rm: cannot remove directory: `..'

Answer 2

Try this:

find . -maxdepth 1 -not -name \. -exec rm -rf \{\} ;

Answer 3

POSIXly:

rm -rf -- * .[!.]* ..?*

That one could fail if the list of files it too big, this one wouldn't:

find . ! -name . -prune -exec rm -rf {} +

With zsh:

rm -rf -- *(D)

Answer 4

Best solution I found is to:

find . -delete

however, -delete predicate is risky (see man) and I don't like to use it.

Update:

I don't like -delete predicate because it can cause a disaster when used by someone not familiar with the details of find's logic. For example:

find . -delete -name '*.bak'  # DO NOT DO IT!!!

Someone may expect such call to remove only '*.bak' files, but it is exact equivalent to find . -delete.

Answer 5

how about

 rm -rf * .[a-z]* .[A-Z]* .[0-9]*

will that work ? or you have other file name patterns to match as well ?

Answer 6

another option is to remember value of pwd, cd .., rm -rf the directory and recreate the directory. This is also ugly for many reasons.

BTW, please do not down-vote. Comment if needed.

Answer 7

First delete files, then empty directories:

find . -type f -exec rm \{\} \;
find . -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir \{\} \;

Answer 8

rm -rf .

This of course does not work at all, however this:

rm -rf -- "$PWD"

removes CWD, and we end up within nonexisting directory. This is very ugly.

BTW, please do not down-vote. Comment if needed.